24 November 2008

Those Happy Danes

Post No 10

Those Happy Danes!!Recently another survey, and this one much more comprehensive than thelast, now covering 80,000 persons in around 170 countries, concluded thatthe Danes are the happiest people on planet Earth, confirming the findingsof the previous one.

Living here you would not know it and I do not know whether to laugh or crywhen I read such reports.True, it is a well-run little country and on the whole things are going prettywell materially speaking but do not be fooled.There are serious tensions close to the surface and big problems out in theopen, particularly as regards immigration and xenophobia, issues exploitedso well by the Danish People's Party and its witch-hunt against all thingsIslamic, but there are other problems too.

Currently 300,000 persons out of a total population of 5,4 million, or ca 5,5%of all Danes, are waiting for significant or serious operations - for a wealthylittle country that is a staggering and disgraceful figure.It is generally accepted that some of those waiting will die before the over-worked system gets round to them. Unacceptable is too mild a word.Yet the government, re-elected last November, has seen fit to join the illegaland barbaric wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and has had noproblems finding the funds to do so. Priorities anybody?And hundreds of thousands, probably more than 10%, are permanently onsome kind of "happiness-pills" (valium etc) prescribed by their doctors,and seeing the world through medically-induced rose-tinted glasses mayindeed distort the results of surveys like these!

Other statistics are perhaps more enlightening:The Nordic countries plus Austria and Switzerland, all at or near the topof the happiness-scores, are all world-leaders when it comes to rates ofsuicide!

Happy Danes? Another way to answer is like this - these kinds of surveyscan not ask the opinions of all those who have already commited suicide!!